Hindsight is 2020

Tasha Werry, Executive Director

What to say about 2020...Farewell, good riddance, thank heavens it's over, hindsight is 2020 - or 2020 is hindsight? Whatever the sentiment, the year has come to an end - so let’s paint a silver lining around it.

BB2C started 2020 with a vision for helping people like us increase their connections with students, businesses, and schools, so that they can reach more students and ultimately do more towards developing their communities and rural economies across the region. Through our BECAN service line we are building a network through of like-minded people and groups across southeast Ohio in order to develop and sustain the powerful connections being made to support community and career connected learning.

With the onset of COVID in mid-March, this vision blurred a bit - with confusion, steep learning curves, and just plain anxiety. By then, we had received confirmation of expansion funding from Ohio University's Voinovich School, through their Appalachian New Economy Partnership fund, and we started to move in that direction. Between some staff turn over and increasing our ranks to help build a regional network, we hired 5 new people between February and April. Two more joined us after securing expansion funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Needless to say, some of our staff didn't meet face to face until the fall. For us, a strange way to exist, but we realize that there are organizations that have existed like this for quite some time.

We now have a much better understanding of how we can build a functioning network to connect educators, students, and businesses and inspire career choice across a vast 25 county region made up of mostly rural communities. As a Gen-Xer, I lovingly refer to COVID as having thrown us all into the deep-end of connective technology. Utilizing this technology to be more efficient leaves more time to research, build, and connect with others doing this work. It turns out there are many people doing this work - and this discovery is the true silver lining.

So many people are dedicated to connecting our young people to opportunities and helping them see the potential right in their own backyards, that there is no way to truly get to them all together without using connective technology. Moving forward, face-to-face is still so very important and we will meet all of the great folks out there in-person eventually. But with our new understanding of the virtual landscape, we will be even more flexible and responsive to the needs of the people we bring into this network that we are building.

We are still implementing all of our career development programs in the Mid-Ohio Valley, and our Makerspace and Small Business Incubator in the Epicenter are still open and ready to serve. It just looks different. If you aren’t aware of how we have adapted or who we hired, just read through some of our 2020 blogs. Despite COVID, and everything else 2020 has thrown at us, we are still developing Successful Students, working to build Strong Businesses, all in order to have Prosperous Communities.